The Demographic That Matters

Scanning the youthful faces of the crowd in Chicago waiting for President Obama on election night, I had the sensation of looking out on a sea of strangers. Despite the fact that they were waving American flags, something seemed chillingly alien.
Given America's racial obsessions, the pundits will continue to shower us with the details of voting trends among this group and that. There is, however, one demographic thread that runs though all racial groups, and it is profoundly more important than any other.
Seeing the Chicago crowd in terms of fatherless children yields a shocking portrait far more significant than the relative superficialities of race, or even the outcome of the election. Using national birth data is bad enough, but given that the crowd was likely not representative of the nation, using those abysmal numbers is arguably conservative.
The chance that a 22-year-old white face in that crowd was born out of wedlock is 1 in 5. For a black...(Read Full Article)